I think all playwriting is a form of adaptation.
As playwrights, we are looking to bring theatrical and dramatic form to the lived experience of being human – we are adapting the world around us. It is the raw material we share with our audiences.
It also holds within it numerous readily-adaptable elements: people, places, events, myths, routines, rituals, structures, social behaviours, environments, news stories, and so on.
What interests me as a playwright is how you can then embed or reflect those many elements (and the ones from your specific raw material too) not only within the content of your work – the action of the story – but within its form too: the shape of the telling.
That’s when you move into something I’d describe as ‘expressive structure’ – storytelling where the ‘how’ of the telling is acutely in concert with the ‘what’.
Others might refer to this as a relationship between form and content. It’s not just what you show, it’s also how you show it.
There’s a Dennis Kelly play I remember that begins with a man sitting in a bath holding a toaster, breathing rapidly. He’s clearly just come to, and has no idea what he’s doing there. He’s there for about a minute, getting more and more distressed. Then the lights black out. That’s the opening scene.
The play continues in this fragmented manner, offering us only snapshots and what feel like abrupt, unfinished or oddly-shaped scenes, each one finished with a blackout, until we finally realise that we are experiencing this story world specifically through the protagonist’s field of vision.
He is a functioning alcoholic, and we are witnessing only what he sees in-between his ‘blackouts’. They’re also remembrances, and not necessarily chronological. All this stuff has already happened.
So in this sort of storytelling, the plot structure ceases to simply be an inevitable linear a-to-b-to-c-to-d framework that the story just conveniently hangs off without much thought.
The structure is an active force and expresses the experience of the protagonist.
Dennis Kelly adapts the dizzying experience of an alcoholic, but not by doing a series of tedious linear therapy scenes with somebody lying on a couch for hours (I know that’s not how it works by the way, deliberate cliché) or some kind of soap-operatic melodrama – instead, he adapts the point of view and experience of the protagonist directly, and turns that into the structure for the storytelling.
Other examples like this include Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information which explores the tension between the relentless reductions of time spent in human relationships in the digital world, versus the ever-multiplying sets of human connections we make online.
Its scenes are multitudinous, and some of them are only a few sentences long. The structure expresses the subject matter – it doesn’t just contain it or prop it up.
Another of the best known examples is playwright Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life where an alleged character called Annie/Anne/Ann who may be at once a car, an art work, an artist, a refugee, a wife (and more) is presented through 16 or 17 contradictory scenes where forces are trying to pin down what she/it is – all this in an attempt (one can argue) to communicate the difficulty of creating an identity in a post-modern world.
It’s not just structure either where you get this direct ‘adaptation’ of experience.
In Fin Kennedy’s How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found the character has to kill off their digital identity to start a new life – but in the play they meet someone at a party who is their pathologist.
The character is both dead and alive at the same time, expressing the disquieting effect of having (in a digital age) both mortal and immortal selves – the themes of the subject matter are adapted directly into the characterisation.
Memento is a good film reference for this sort of POV-structure. A man with short-term memory loss is trying to track the killer of his wife, and has covered himself in tattoos in an attempt to not lose the thread.
We can only solve the clues in the same order he does, and experience the same POV as the protagonist at the centre of the story. It’s something I think film can do well because it can force us to look down the lens of the character’s eyes through the camera, literally adapting their experience of the story for us – but it’s possible in theatre too.
Structure can be a dynamic tool, not just a washing-line for plot points.
That’s all easily said in the writing of course, but the crucial thing is that each of the characters in these stories would still have what I’d call a ‘lived linearity’, and I’d guess the writers would have some idea of what that was (perhaps with the exception of Crimp) because that’s the logic we’re searching for as an audience.
We know that life goes in that direction of cause-and-effect, because that’s how we experience it too, and that’s how we want our characters to ultimately have experienced it as well.
What intrigues me is that it’s often only when things are put out of order that the drama becomes exceptional – take Harold Pinter’s Betrayal for example, a story about an affair which finishes with the very first spark of the betrayal itself.
The structure goes backwards in loops across nine years, with the first scene in the play being the last time that the key characters meet in the chronological arc of the story.
This makes for the audience a huge deal out of the benefit of foresight, as we double-read the subtext of the action knowing not only where it’s all going to end up, but also what some characters know in the scene before their counterparts do.
Read in a linear fashion however, I think it’s one of the most boring plays ever.
More contemporary plays do a much better job of sophisticated adaptation of idea and concept and theme into structure, characterisation and story: for a masterclass in marriage of form and content try Nick Payne’s Constellations or Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen.
At the heart of it, this whole process of adaptation is really about metaphor.
Strong adaptation is metaphor – it’s one thing not just standing in for something else, but distilling and expressing it in a way that reveals it in new, brighter colours.
With all these structural/formal adaptations referred to above though, there’s still a solid linear human experience being expressed. You have to know what that is first to be able to mess around with it, otherwise it’s just formal invention and non-linearity for the sake of it.
Take any of the raw material that you’re working with for your current play, and ask yourself what it would mean for a piece of theatre to fully express that – how all those elements of dramaturgy in the story and potential production could ‘adapt’ that subject matter into the deep craft of your play, rather than just ‘tell’ it.
You could end up with a theatrically expressive world unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
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